8 Best WordPress Themes (Astra, GeneratePress for E-commerce)

This article recommends WordPress themes. A WordPress theme not only determines the visual style of a website but also directly impacts the visitor’s browsing experience, conversion rate, and future optimization potential.

Currently, there are tens of thousands of free and paid themes available in the official WordPress marketplace and on third-party platforms like ThemeForest. For beginners, it’s easy to be swayed by dazzling appearances and complex features, neglecting core factors such as speed, SEO, and stability. My advice is: when choosing a theme, prioritize themes that load quickly, have a simple structure, are easy to customize, and support mainstream plugins (such as Elementor, WPML, etc.), rather than being misled by fancy demo pages.

This article will teach you how to install a WordPress theme and recommend several themes with excellent performance and functionality based on my personal experience and the actual needs of building an e-commerce website.

My recommendation: If your goal is to build an e-commerce website, Astra and GeneratePress are the most reliable choices. The free versions are sufficient for most e-commerce sites. If you want to achieve richer page effects, you can combine them with the Elementor Pro page builder, which can basically meet more than 95% of website building needs without pursuing various complex themes. This combination ensures website speed and is compatible with subsequent SEO and functional expansion, making it a “long-term” solution for the growth of an e-commerce website. If your goal is to build a blog or news site, then you can use Soledad, a WordPress theme specifically designed for content.

What is a WordPress Theme?

From a technical perspective, a WordPress theme is essentially a collection of files that work together to form the overall design of a website. It includes stylesheets (CSS), template files (PHP), images, and JavaScript, and is responsible for defining all front-end visual elements of the website, such as page structure, colors, fonts, menus, sidebars, and article lists. Simply put, a theme is like changing a website’s “skin,” allowing the same website to instantly transform into a completely different style.

Using a WordPress theme allows us to easily set website elements such as logos, titles, fonts, sizes, and color schemes. WordPress themes also provide templates for our websites. For example, on my website, no matter which page we visit, the style of the page will change according to different pages, while the header and footer remain unchanged. This part can be regarded as the website’s template.

Without templates, we would need to manually add headers and footers to each page, which is feasible but extremely inefficient. Using templates can fix the repetitive parts of a page, effectively reducing workload.

Choosing the right WordPress theme can not only make the website look more professional and beautiful but also affect the website’s user experience, loading speed, and SEO performance. We can find a large number of free and paid themes on ThemeForest, suitable for different types of websites, such as blogs, corporate websites, e-commerce sites, and online stores.

Installing and switching themes is also very simple and does not require any programming knowledge. You can activate it with one click in the backend.

How to Install a WordPress Theme?

There are two methods corresponding to different types of WordPress themes. Free WordPress themes can be searched and installed in the theme market of the WordPress backend; while paid themes cannot be searched in the WP backend, so they need to be uploaded and installed.

Method 1: Install in the WordPress Backend

Access the WP backend via yourdomain(dot)com/wp-login(dot)php, click “Appearance” -> “Themes” to enter the WordPress theme interface. After installing WordPress, we will use the default WP theme, but this theme has relatively few functions and configurations. If we want to change the theme, we can click “Add New Theme” to enter the WP theme market.

Enter the WP theme market and search for the WP theme we want in the search box on the right.

Move the mouse over the WP theme, and two options will appear. Click “Live Preview” to preview the style after using the new theme, and click “Install” to install the new theme.

Return to the theme panel (via “Appearance” -> “Themes”), click “Activate” on the new theme to activate it.

Method 2: Upload and Install

This method is more suitable for installing paid themes. Enter the WP backend, click “Appearance” -> “Themes” to enter the WordPress theme interface. Click “Add New Theme”, then click “Upload Theme”.

Click “Browse” in the newly popped-up file selection box, select the WordPress theme compressed package on your local computer, and click “Install Now” after uploading to install the new theme.

How to Choose a High-Quality WordPress Theme?

Theme Speed and Performance

The theme should be as “lightweight” as possible and load quickly. You can use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to test the speed of the theme’s demo site and avoid choosing themes that are bloated, have redundant code, and load slowly. Choosing a lightweight WordPress theme can reduce page loading time, ultimately affecting the website’s SEO and conversion rate.

Theme Reviews, Downloads, and Community Reputation

We can find a large number of free and paid themes on ThemeForest, and the ratings and reviews of these themes can give you a good reference. You can make a general judgment based on this information. However, everyone’s concept of good is different. Some users think that cool animations are good, while others think that simple and fast response speed is good, so you have to consider other factors.

Responsive Design

When Google released the mobile-first indexing algorithm, responsive design should be a must-have for all e-commerce websites. Moreover, 30%-50% of the traffic is mobile traffic. If the website lacks responsive design, then your website will bring a bad experience to this part of users. This is even more true when you invest in B2B advertising. It can be said that 70-80% of the traffic is mobile traffic (even if you add a premium to the PC side).

SEO Friendly

The theme structure needs to be search engine friendly, such as reasonable Heading tags, semantic HTML, and support for breadcrumb navigation. You can check whether the theme advertises “SEO optimization” or actually see high-ranking websites using the theme on Google.

Rich Basic Settings

Basic settings such as Logo (including size, position), Header, Footer, Widget, and font, font color, etc. will vary depending on the WordPress theme. Ideally, choosing a lightweight WordPress theme with rich basic settings can allow you to customize your website to a greater extent.

Plugin Compatibility

Plugin compatibility should also be considered when choosing a theme. We must use WordPress plugins to build an e-commerce website with WordPress, so we must ensure that the theme is compatible with commonly used plugins (such as Rank Math, WooCommerce, WPML, WP Rocket, etc.) and the latest WordPress version.

8 Excellent WordPress Themes Recommended

Compared to those WordPress themes that look cool but load slowly and are complicated to operate, what really attracts me to these 8 themes is their extremely fast response speed and rich functions. Whether you are building a blog, e-commerce website (whether B2B or B2C), corporate website, or content-based website, these themes can be easily adapted.

Astra

Astra theme In the official WordPress statistics, as of 2024, more than one million websites use the Astra theme, and this number is still growing rapidly. Astra’s rating has reached a full five stars, which shows its popularity in the WordPress community. Astra’s code is very clean, the core volume is less than 50 KB, the default loading time is about 400 ms, and the PageSpeed Insights score can reach 100%, with extremely excellent performance. And the Astra theme uses Vanilla JavaScript and does not contain the jQuery library, which can reduce blocking loading and has better performance than themes using jQuery.

Astra is also perfectly compatible with various interface builders and WordPress plugins. Users can modify the code and install plugins as needed, and combine them with page builders to achieve a high degree of customization of the website. This is also my favorite point.

Features: Very simple and easy to use. Astra simplifies complex operations, making it easier for novices to get started. Astra only takes half an hour to fully master the configuration of various functions, which is extremely rare in WordPress themes.

Suitable for: E-commerce website or content-based website owners who pursue ultimate performance and SEO performance; users who use Elementor and other builders combined with Astra templates to improve efficiency

GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a lightweight, multipurpose WordPress theme developed by Tom Usborne and his team, offering free and Premium versions. It is known for its modular design, with a theme volume of only about 7.5 KB (some tests show 10 KB) by default, with very few resource requests and excellent performance. Like Astra, it supports Gutenberg native construction and is also compatible with mainstream page builders such as Elementor and Beaver Builder, allowing you to create the webpage you want.

Features: High performance, GeneratePress’s lightweight structure allows PageSpeed Insights mobile scores to reach 95+, Desktop is full score, and the loading response time is extremely short. Combining performance optimization techniques can achieve double 100; compatibility is very strong, GeneratePress is built according to high coding standards, and can work well with most top plugins.

Suitable for: E-commerce websites and website building companies that pursue speed and SEO performance

Divi

Divi is the flagship theme launched by Elegant Themes, with a built-in powerful visual drag-and-drop page editor (Divi Builder), integrating theme and page builder, and is very comprehensive in function. Drag-and-drop design, zero code can also achieve a high degree of customization. And Divi also has rich built-in templates and modules, supporting animations, A/B testing. And there is a strong support community, tutorials and official technical support.

Features: Divi’s code is much heavier than Astra and GeneratePress, but Divi provides thousands of preset layout templates, covering many industries such as enterprise, e-commerce, and events.

Suitable for: Designers, website owners who value vision and creativity; because of its rich templates, it is especially suitable for companies or agents that need to customize and often make different styles of pages

Kadence

Kadence is a lightweight, multipurpose WordPress theme that supports free and Pro versions. The theme body is only about 40–45 KB after installation, requiring only 9 HTTP requests, and its loading performance leads similar themes. And it is deeply integrated with the Kadence Blocks plugin, especially optimizing the Gutenberg editor, providing full-site customization capabilities and high-performance performance.

Features: Built-in Starter Templates can quickly build a complete site, with different styles adapted to industry needs. The free version can use global color schemes, typography, Header/Footer builders, etc., and you can use drag and drop to layout.

Suitable for: Users who value performance and tend to use Gutenberg to build pages

Blocksy

Blocksy is a lightweight, multipurpose WordPress theme optimized for Gutenberg and Elementor. It focuses on performance and flexibility, with a core volume of about 48 KB, requiring only 6 HTTP requests, and its loading speed is comparable to high-performance themes such as Astra and GeneratePress. Blocksy provides about 25 high-quality demo site templates for quickly deploying different types of website designs. And currently Blocksy has nearly 1000 reviews in the WordPress theme market, basically reaching 5-star praise.

Features: Blocksy has a night mode “Customizer Dark Mode”, which can enable a dark theme. Users can enable the night mode in “Appearance” -> “Cutomize”.

Suitable for: Operators who want to use the Gutenberg editor to make high-value websites; it is also fully compatible with commonly used page builders, such as Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, etc., even website owners who do not use Gutenberg can use it with confidence

Hello Elementor

Hello Elementor is a minimalist WordPress theme launched by Elementor, containing only the most basic styles and the least code. The design itself is almost blank, and all pages are customized by Elementor. Due to its minimalist design, the loading speed is leading, with fewer requests and smaller page volume than Astra, GeneratePress, etc. But things are two-sided. If you plan to use Elementor, then this theme may not be suitable for you. Although the code is lightweight, 404, archive pages, product pages, headers and footers, etc. all need to be built with Elementor Pro, and the initial operation is complicated.

Features: Extremely lightweight, very fast loading speed, suitable for full customization, marketing landing pages, etc.

Suitable for: 100% compatible with Elementor, extremely high page freedom; users with e-commerce website building needs; teams that need extreme speed and highly customized landing pages

Betheme

Betheme is one of the best-selling multipurpose WordPress themes on ThemeForest, with more than 600 pre-built website templates (preset demo sites), covering various industries and needs such as enterprise, e-commerce, portfolio, blog, education, etc., and can basically achieve “there are templates for whatever site you want to build”. It comes with Muffin Builder and is compatible with mainstream page editors such as Elementor and WPBakery, supporting drag-and-drop design, and can achieve a high degree of customization without code. However, its preset style is not the type I like, which is not a big problem. We can use Betheme’s custom functions and Elementor to decorate our website later. You can go to the theme market to install and try it.

Features: Has more than 600 pre-built website templates (preset demo sites); good performance optimization, supports responsive design and multilingual, SEO friendly

Suitable for: Users who want their website to go live quickly and have flexible follow-up expansion; companies and agents that need high-efficiency website building themes

Soledad

Soledad is a multipurpose WordPress theme developed by PenciDesign, especially suitable for content-based websites (blogs, magazines, media, review sites). It supports WordPress Customizer, Elementor and WPBakery page builders, and can quickly build professional sites without coding. However, it is rich in functions but has many options, and beginners are easily overwhelmed by various interface settings. Currently Soledad only has a paid version.

Features: Massive demo templates, providing 200+ preset websites + 900+ homepage combination layouts, supporting one-click import and mixed and matched use

Suitable for: Content-based website operators, media, news blogs; websites that need multi-column, multi-style content display

WordPress Themes I Personally Like to Use

Personally, whether I am building an e-commerce website or a content site, I generally use Astra and GeneratePress these two WordPress themes. Recently, I have been using Astra more often, because I am personally familiar with the various custom operations of this theme, and the functions of this WordPress theme can meet my needs, so I have been using this one.

These two WordPress themes are designed with very clean code, not only optimized for mobile, but also very SEO friendly, and load very quickly, making them very suitable for use as WordPress themes for e-commerce websites. Their custom options are very easy to get started with and expand for novices, allowing you to control almost all parts of the website’s content, unlike some themes that require code to implement specific functions (such as the Copyright at the bottom).

And they are highly compatible with mainstream editors such as Gutenberg and Elementor, as well as WooCommerce. Astra is even more so. As long as you activate the WooCommerce plugin, your product interface and product front-end settings can be controlled in Customize.

These two WordPress themes do not have too many redundant functions, are very worry-free to maintain, and are stable for long-term updates, so you don’t have to worry about subsequent compatibility or security issues. The community is active and there are many tutorials. You can quickly find solutions to almost any problem. We can meet most e-commerce website needs by using the free version, and the cost performance is also very high after upgrading to Pro. Compared to those bloated, fancy but slow-loading themes, these two themes truly achieve a balance between speed, SEO and scalability, making them very suitable for independent stations that do brands and overseas customer acquisition for a long time.

If your goal is to build a blog or news site, then you can also try using Soledad, a WordPress theme specifically designed for content sites. However, Soledad currently only has a paid version, you can go to Themeforest to see their Demo before deciding whether you need to buy it.

Key Takeaways

• Choosing the right WordPress theme is crucial for website success.
• Prioritize themes with fast loading speeds, simple structures, and SEO-friendliness.
• Astra and GeneratePress are excellent choices for e-commerce websites due to their performance and customizability.
• Consider plugin compatibility when selecting a theme.

FAQ

1. How do I install a WordPress theme?You can install a theme through the WordPress backend by searching for free themes or uploading paid themes.
2. What factors should I consider when choosing a WordPress theme?Consider speed, performance, responsive design, SEO-friendliness, and plugin compatibility.
3. Are Astra and GeneratePress suitable for all types of websites?While they are excellent for e-commerce websites, Soledad is a better option for blogs and news sites.